Posts tagged: Adventure Stories

In 1197, the Marshal—Sir William the Marshal—stormed a French castle single-handed. He was fifty years old.

A respected commander, past his best as a combatant, the Marshal had stood by and watched while King Richard Lionheart hurled his men at the ramparts. Two knightly storming parties weathered a rain of arrows, stones, lumps of wood, hauled themselves to the top of their ladders, took on the flails, forks and spears of the defenders. One of the ladders broke. Thousands of pounds of men and maille thudded into the ditch.

The other party retreated, all except for Sir Guy de la Bruyere, trapped at the top of the ladder—the defenders had him hooked by his maille. He could only keep his shield up while they hammered at him with flails, and archers peppered his armour.

The Marshal draws his sword, leaps down into the ditch, slithers through the mud. Shafts buzz past, ping off his helm. Long-limbed, he takes the ladder like an iron-skinned spider.

King Richard—the man who led the beach assault at Jaffa, crossbow in one hand, Danish axe in the other—wants to go after him. His advisors hold him back; Leave the crazy old knight to his fate, they tell him. We need to regroup and attack properly, or not at all.

The Marshal reaches Sir Guy, climbs over him, vaults onto the battlements. A single greybeard, outnumbered, out-of-puff, surrounded by a mob of men with spears and flails. How will this end?

Badly for the defenders.

The Marshal strikes to the left and the right, clears the parapet. He stands in the midst of the carnage, gasping for breath. He’s too old for this game.

Sir William de Monceaux, the young constable of the castle, sees his chance to win fame. He charges over the blood-slick wall walk and lays into the greybeard. The Marshal cleaves his helmet with a single blow. The blade passes through the maille and padding beneath, shears into the scalp, throws the young knight unconscious to the stones.

Tired now, the Marshal sits on the downed man and waits for the rest of the army to join him.

#

And that was the Marshal at the age of fifty. At seventy he led the charge into Lincoln, carved his way through the bodyguard of the French captain. What must he have been like in his thirties when he went to the Holy Land?

More to the point, what did he get up to while he was there?

His rollicking contemporary biography, The History of William Marshal gives us a blow-by-blow account of his career. He’s pretty much a posh William Thatcher from the movie Knight’s Tale, working his way up from nothing via the tournament circuit (only with more fatality and less Rock and Roll). Then in 1183 his patron died, and the Marshal took ship for the Holy Land. All the History tells us is that he stayed there for a couple of years and did great deeds.

What great deeds?

The Marshal arrived too late for the main 1183 campaign—no glorious battles, that one anyway. By 1187, he’d been home for at least a year, so was not there when the Crusaders rode out to their doom at the Horns of Hattin.

However, we have a record of one feat of arms for the very end of 1183. It was the kind of crazy stunt only the Marshal could have pulled off, and therein lies the genesis of M. Harold Page’s new SideQuest, Marshal vs the Assassins.

There’s a big secret in The Book of Seven Hands, and Imma spill it. Ready?

One of my main male characters – a swordsman and paragon of Spanish masculinity – is not a man.

Don’t worry, that reveal comes almost as soon as the character is introduced, and I won’t give the character’s name here, so I’m not spoiling the story for you.

But I do want to blog about my “swishbuckling” hero because researching how Spaniards thought of gender in 1524 completely fascinates me, and I’m not quite ready to let it go. In fact, my research on Spanish notions of gender, masculinity, and attitudes toward cross-dressing completely hijacked my adventure plot.

I wanted a female character posing as a man in this adventure, because while researching I chanced across a historical figure that I couldn’t ignore: The so called “lieutenant nun,” Catalina de Erauso, a fascinating exception to Spanish gender rules that proves them all.

Catalina de Earauso was born in 1590, and when she was four years old, her father entered her into a nunnery.

At fifteen, she was about to take her vows to become a nun when she got involved in a quarrel (I’m guessing “brawl,” considering Catalina’s personality) with an older nun. Erauso took the opportunity to flee the nunnery, fashion breeches from a dress and a doublet from her petticoat, and change her name from Catalina to Francisco. Erauso would live as a man for the rest of his life.

Erauso would suffer many challenges to his masculinity, many of which would land him in jail for fighting. But the crucial moment comes at sixteen when a young tough named Reyes insults him – and Erauso, working as a page at this time, responds as Spanish gender-code dictates: He faces his bully and makes him pay for the insult. From Erauso’s own autobiography:

“[Reyes] told me I’d best disappear, or he’d be forced to cut my face wide open. Seeing as how I was weaponless, except for a short dagger, I made my exit, more than a little enraged…

“The next morning, a Monday…I saw Reyes walk past the door, first one way and then the other. I closed the shop, grabbed up a knife, and went looking for a barber to grind the blade to a sawtoothed edge, and then, throwing on my sword – it was the first I ever wore – I went looking for Reyes and found him where he was strolling by the church with a friend. I approached him from behind and said, “Ah, Señor Reyes!” He turned and asked, “What do you want?” I said, “This is the face you were thinking of cutting up,” and gave him a slash worth ten stitches. He clutched at the wound with both hands, his friend drew his sword and came at me, and I went at him with my own. We met, I thrust the blade through his left side, and down he went.”

Bar-mitzvah by way of blade and blood: Today she is a man.

From there, Erauso’s story is non-stop violence as he boards a ship and makes for Central and South America. From his autobiography Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, which of course must be taken with a giant block of salt, we learn Erauso served the King’s Army in Chile and Peru, brawled, dueled, and gambled constantly, wooed women and was nearly married to a girl who’d fallen in love with him, made lieutenant, was reprimanded more than once for excessive violence toward the native people of those colonies, and unknowingly killed his own brother Miguel in a duel.

Due to these violent escapades, Erauso’s time in South America was also punctuated with petitions of sanctuary for protection in a church or, interestingly, a convent. Historical records verify that he sought sanctuary six times in Peru and Chile to avoid military arrest and/or close inspection of his person, presumably.

During his sixth and final sanctuary, Erauso was wounded badly and figured it was time to confess his story to a Bishop in Lima. Nuns were brought in to examine Erauso, and they determined that the lieutenant was indeed a woman and “virginal as the day she was born.” Intriguingly, the Bishop declares that Erauso is both a perfect woman and a perfect man. (More on this in a moment.)

Erauso recovered, but, thinking his life was over having admitted his big Truth, he returns to Spain, arriving in Cádiz, where he finds that he’s a celebrity: His story has preceded him and Spain has been telling tales of the “lieutenant nun” for weeks. Erauso appears before King Philip IV where he petitions the king seeking for a military pension. The king sends Erauso to Rome, where the Pope concurs with the Bishop in Lima and grants him dispensation to continue dressing as a man, advising Philip to bestow the pension upon Erauso. Erauso writes his autobiography and retires to Mexico.

Gender is a performance and not a static state, even in Early Modern Spain, and Erauso’s gender is a commanding star turn. Not only does he totally “become the part,” as method actors say, but when it’s determined upon examination that Francisco is actually a Catalina, a bishop and the pope declare him the paragon of manhood and the perfect woman.

Why? How is that possible?

To grasp this, it’s important for us modernistas to grasp that gender wasn’t a dichotomy of scientific co-equals – not in heavily Catholic Spain (the notion of two genders is a humanistic, post-Renaissance ideal). In medieval Christian thought, gender was a monolith. There was only one gender, male, and the “female” was an imperfection of the male. It goes a long way in explaining medieval Christianity’s abject misogyny to realize that a virgin was the perfect state for women, that a married or pregnant woman was considered even “less than woman.” Laws regarding “limpieza de sangre,” Spain’s codified racial purity laws, bolstered the religious significance that Spain placed on the state of virginity.

So the idea that the head of the Catholic Church would deem Erauso to be both a manly heroic fighter who passionately defended his masculinity and a virginal and blessed woman was a bit of a paradox, perhaps, but not hypocrisy. He’d managed both and deserved praise for it (indeed, no man could do what Erauso had done). Catalina de Erauso was a social, political, and religious marvel.

Part of what I love about Erauso’s narrative is that there’s something modern, almost American about it. Stories like this usually involve Ellis Island, a beat-up six-string guitar, or being discovered at a cafe in Hollywood and made into a movie star. But Spain in 1600 was very much like a young America. The myth and promise of the New World had unleashed a boomtown consciousness and Spain was urging its young men to “go west” long before there even was a United State. Indeed, so many young men were boarding ships, joining the Spanish army/armada, and becoming conquistadores or pirates that the populations of some towns in central Spain were 90% women in the Sixteenth Century. As never before, Spaniards could level up in economic class and completely reinvent themselves.

For my purposes in The Book of Seven Hands, I lifted what I found most interesting about Catalina de Erauso and gave it to one of my heroes: Her indomitable spirit and drive for dominance. Some scholars make the compelling argument that Erauso was a lesbian, that her sexuality drove her to dress and pose as a man (but if so, why not remain in the nunnery?), while others say she was simply driven by economic desire. Those elements could be part of the story too (Erauso never muses why she did what she did), but to me, I see a naturally dominant person, unable to submit if she wanted to, born into a world where there were no words for what she was or how she needed to live. It wasn’t enough to dress as a man. She chose to be a brawler and womanizer. It wasn’t enough to brawl, she had to be duelist, a swordsman. She had to be the best. As a an educated, virginal nun, Catalina would have held a social status above that of, say, a farmer’s wife or a mother of many. But she still would have had to submit, to the pecking order of a cloister, a Mother Superior, and my hunch is she knew she couldn’t do it. There was something about that night when she was fifteen, the quarrel/brawl with an older nun, and the constricting vows of sisterhood that drove Catalina de Erauso to prove she was something else, more, and huge.

Writing The Book of Seven Handscould have been a simple matter: Heroes go on quest to translate an ancient tome owned by their beloved teacher; Heroes run into three successive problems; Heroes thrust and parry their way to victory! Amen. That’s all readers really want, right?

But as an enthusiast of Mexican and Spanish history, and of Zorro, too, I wanted a swashbuckling story with deep historical accuracy.

I initially began writing The Book of Seven Hands with novelist Will Alexander, and he had the great idea of the character’s needing the famous alchemist Paracelsus to translate their ancient tome. So after deciding that history places Paracelsus in Spain in 1524, our work was cut out for us to make that world come alive.

Well, I had my work cut out for me. Unfortunately, Will had a book deadline that interfered with our swashbuckling, so he had to hit eject on this project (tough luck for him: he went on to win the national Book Award last fall). So it fell to me make early modern Spain come alive.

As a result, I quickly realized certain words couldn’t be used, words that made writing a story about swashbuckling . . . well, problematic.

The two words that I told myself not to use: RAPIER and DUEL.

Here’s why:

RAPIER

Don Diego without a rapier? Inigo Montoya without his father’s sword? Why refuse the word rapier, if a swashbuckling adventure is what you want to write?

Pretty Scroll-hilt Rapier

It might sound like a picky thing, but the word rapier wasn’t used in 1524 and in Spain that word doesn’t come along until the late 16th Century. The need for carrying long, thin swords for personal security was present in 1524 Spain (see DUEL below for more on that) and in one of the earliest appearances of the English word, a rapier is referred to as “the Spanische sword” (1530), suggesting that Spain might have even given birth to the first rapiers.

But scroll-hilted swords with a sharpened edge? Those pretty swords so prevalent in a readers’ mind aren’t common for a few more decades.

In the late 1490s, the term used for a rapier-like sword was espada ropera, that is, dress sword (indeed, ropera may be the origin of the word rapier), and another was espada corta (short sword), a term used for the simple stabbing swords that had been common in Europe since the Roman legion. Espada ropera just sounded odd to me, so I used the terms espada corta and espada, or sometimes just “sword,” and did my best to give a taste of this murky moment in the rapier’s history when I could:

“His widening eyes seeming to swallow the insanity of the situation – a French-looking woman dressed all in gray with a savagely broken nose and an espada so long and thin with such a deadly edge right down to the hilt that it looked like a weapon from the future.”

DUEL

In the end, I used this word once or twice, but I cringed inside when I did. Because when I began writing The Book of Seven Hands, I wanted to avoid using it altogether.

Why? Because dueling didn’t mean sword fighting until much later in the Sixteenth Century. It would be like writing about travel in 1905 and using the word “driving” for riding a horse.

To be clear, what we think of sword dueling was a nobleman’s martial art, the means to defend one’s class and reputation. In 1524, if you said two guys were “dueling,” it meant they were aristocrats settling a judicial dispute, not whipping out swords a la Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom.

Sword fighting did become that, of course, but only after half a century of the lower classes hashing things in the rougher quarters of Europe. My thinking is that sword fighting initially became popular not by aristocrats defending their honor but by Spain sending Christopher Columbus on his voyage of discovery.

Think about it.

From 1492 onward, gold, tobacco, and lucrative new commodities from the New World came pouring into Spain’s port towns. The volume of wealth sailing across the Atlantic would be enough to finance wars in Italy, Holland, and France, and it would make Spain the preeminent European superpower for the next two centuries. We’re talking about a ransacking of Roman proportions and it was just toddling down the docks of Seville, day after day.

Who was guarding it? There was no Spanish Armada at first – not until 1588. Spain itself didn’t even have a national army until 1495 or so and whole regions of Spain were unconnected except by ancient Roman and Carthaginian roads. So for the 20-30 years after the plundering of the Americas began, Spain’s ports were nothing more than big juicy ducks waiting to be shot. The age of piracy was inevitable: Get a ship, hire some sailors with loose morals, a gross of espadas cortas from the local smithy, and grab yourself a piece of the action in short order.

But forget about pirates. That’s another story (he said with an eager grin). Why go to the trouble of commandeering a ship when all the gold has to come ashore eventually? Just imagine what the docks of Seville and Cadiz must have been like before Spain started policing its cities aggressively. The seaside public houses and alleyways must have been bristling with weapons. The fights among mercenaries, privateers, thugs, and the occasional nobleman getting dragged down into the muck would have been lethal. And brief.

In my mind, these are the conditions in which the “Spanische sword” became common as prayer in Spain.

Because mastering the sword would have been an immediate necessity (and not a martial “art,” per se). One of my sources discussed the poor quality of espadas cortas used by Spanish sailors in the 1490s, saying their blades broke frequently. To me that suggests the quality of weapon-forging hadn’t caught up with the new and widespread demand yet. A simple parry of blade on blade, the kind that anyone would perform out of reflex, might leave a young tough with no weapon. And dead in the street.

Playing that out, if you spent the money on a sturdier espada corta, well-forged by a cunning weapons-smith (and there were plenty of those guys in the ancient metal town of Toledo), you were more likely to win fights by being aggressive and letting your opponent parry, if he dare. If you were lucky to survive a fight or two beyond that, you might realize that your espada corta is actually a decent piece of armor, too. You don’t need a massive sword and thick helmet or grieves, if you can parry once and counter thrust effectively. That would be enough, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mercutio.

So sword fighting did exist in Spain, and it would have been a finely honed skill, har har, but a skill developed out of fear of death and sheer necessity for most. My Spaniards almost certainly would not have called it “dueling,” a martial art, or anything other than luchar — fighting — and without aristocratic honor to muss things up yet, fighting would have been its own tough reward.

Our chief scribe, Mark Teppo, was asked to write a little something about the genre classification of The Mongoliad for Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist. As it has been some time since that post went up over there, we’re not above pulling a copy here for our records.

. || . || . || . || .

One of the comments I hear regularly when I tell people about The Mongoliad is “Oh, well, I don’t read epic fantasy.” They don’t mean to be dismissive about it; they’re just pointing out that, in all likelihood, they’ve already checked out of this conversation and the rest is simply going to be me talking to them while they think about butterflies or chocolate covered bonbons or the like. I’d don’t really want to be dismissive in return, because, really, “epic” and “fantasy” are two words that mean a lot more than the sort of thing that Tolkein wrote.

Here’s the thing: I understand labels. I understand genre marketing. I get that people like to put things in neat little boxes so that they know how to approach them. I also started off my career writing “urban fantasy” books that don’t have werewolves, vampires, or the undead in them. I call the Codex books “occult noir” and no one understands what I’m saying; I say “urban fantasy” and we have, at least, a general starting point.

For a moment, then, let’s consider this claim that The Mongoliad is an epic fantasy. What’s epic about it is the amount of research we did. We wanted to write a Western martial arts adventure story, one that was true to the actual fighting techniques of the time. Fighting techniques that are, only now, being rediscovered and taught in martial arts schools around the world. You know what? There’s a lot more to fighting with a sword than simply hitting the other guy first.

And as we went down the rabbit hole of martial arts, we realized we couldn’t short-change the rest of the story as well. So, when we talk about how Rœdwulf’s bow is constructed and how he fires it, it’s because we dug up copies of Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus, a 16th century manual of proper construction and use of the longbow. When we talk about the composition of the forests around Legnica, it’s because we sourced–as near as we could fathom–historical from Polish naturalists who are keen on the history of their local greenery. (We also had a list of about twenty bird species that were native to the area and we would have worked them all in somehow, but, well, we had to draw the line somewhere.) The point is: we wanted to get as many of the details right as we could, because history is so much, much more fantastic than you can ever imagine.

We had a conversation once about where to file The Mongoliad. Was it alternate history? Not entirely. Was it a secret history? Somewhat. Did we make things up? Certainly. Did we stretch the truth a bit? Most definitely. Our knights, for example, use techniques that aren’t entirely codified for another two hundred years (the key word here is “entirely”); their use of armor is about fifty years ahead of the rest of the Europe (they’re bad-ass outliers, of course). And there are things that we make up entirely (the Binders, for instance). Oh, and the entire crypto-pagan mythology that underlies all of Foreworld?

Well, I’ll argue we didn’t make that up, but then again, I’m the one who has a soft spot for esoteric mystery schools.

You could argue the difference between science fiction and fantasy is the application of faith. The difference between regular fantasy and epic fantasy is then, perhaps, the amount of faith you have to bring with you when you read a story. We’ve written a story about medieval Europe, and guess what? They had a much, much different baseline for faith than we do now.

It’s just an adventure story, really, a long-form novel that illuminated a period of history that is wonderfully rich in both its belief systems, its technologies, and its martial arts. We call our version of history Foreworld, because it is a different state of the world. How much you believe what we’ve written is up to you, but I can tell you that both more and less of the work is true.

In which case, maybe the best way to classify The Mongoliad is to call it an Epic Historical Fantasy.